


i just want to live in peace (but i'm struggling to believe)

by hearden



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Christianity, Gen, Post-Canon Fix-It, The Problem of Susan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-11
Updated: 2018-07-11
Packaged: 2019-06-08 18:01:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15248841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hearden/pseuds/hearden
Summary: Susan chooses to give up, not because she truly believes she should, but because grief draws her away, knowing she will always still be a daughter of Narnia.





	i just want to live in peace (but i'm struggling to believe)

**Author's Note:**

> so i have a chronicles of narnia class starting in over a month and my professor is 1) super conservative and 2) a c.s. lewis stan and 3) one of those "write me an essay on what i tell you" so i KNOW i won't get to turn in angry ramblings about susan for a grade so
> 
> here we fucking go i'm angry and i sure wish c.s. lewis had gotten to write susan of narnia but to be honest, i'm sure it wouldn't have been what she deserved, anyway
> 
> this is all going to be a mess because as of right now i've only reread TL/TW/TWR and Prince Caspian but i'm just so ANGRY knowing what happens to susan

There's a difference between forgetting and choosing not to believe. One is hardly a choice, something that is just an onset of old age or natural scatterbrained tendencies and such, and the other can only be called a choice.

Many things happen the year that Susan loses everything. For one, she loses everything.

But, also, treaties are signed in the aftermath of a second great war. It's not quite as great as the ones Susan knew of, but swords and bows cannot be compared to guns and atomic bombs. Sometimes, she listens because people have recordings of what they must have sounded like, and she shakes her head because the bombs sound too much like a distant roar than she feels comfortable dwelling on. Still, it is war, and she knows war.

A new flag flies over China, blood red and adorned with five stars. The golden yellow and bright red together bring a sickening lurch to her stomach, reminding her of Peter's shield as he would march them into battle. All one for Narnia, under the helm of High King Peter the Magnificent. This, however, is a different world order; she can feel it in her bones without listening to the news.

There's a book that's all the buzz. Susan picks up a copy because it's what everyone in her classes are talking about, what everyone at the library is discussing, and she tries her best to keep to herself after the accident but she can't very well stay away from all people forever. She is still alive, after all, and that's just the absolute worse. So, she reads about perpetual war and the government keeping a watchful eye over them and scoffs because, while she doesn't know too well the troubles of this world, she knows the troubles of the world she left behind. They hurt all the same, and feeding her paranoia is a useless feat. She puts the book at the back of her bookshelf and doesn't try to reach for it again.

The world changes, and Susan's perception of time has always been a little skewed. It has always been since she left Narnia, but that's just how it always is. Once she's been a queen for what had felt like decades of her life, everything else seems to pass in a split second yet also take hours upon hours of eternity. Her awareness is heightened yet dulled in the same way, and she comes to despise it. The clinks of glasses on a bar countertop and the sound of metal against metal as she walks past a construction site on the street are so startlingly loud in her ears that she almost flinches, yet it sometimes takes a classmate of hers three finger snaps in front of her face for her to notice she's being spoken to.

Sometimes, she zones out. Thinks of nothing and everything, of the position of the stars and the feeling like she's being watched, of her classwork that's got to be due soon yet it always feels like Monday and never Tuesday, and thinks of Narnia.

She doesn't go to church anymore, not because it hurts but because it doesn't. There's a numbness that seeps into her bones, much like the cold that had first bitten at her ankles when she first stumbled into that wardrobe at Professor Kirke's house. She knows that she has the strength to get up and make herself go every Sunday, but she doesn't because it would all be the motions and gears and none of the heart. It would mean nothing to her, knowing that she can't go back.

When she sleeps at night, she regales herself with tales. Not tales of Narnia in its golden days, but what it will be like when she finally has lived all of her mortal life on this earth. Sometimes, after a few too many drinks after classes are over, stumbling into her dormitory and collapsing into her bed, she tells herself that she'll come to a set of gates and Aslan will roar his rejection of her so loudly that it'll rattle her bones. But, at least she'd get to hear his sound again.

Instead, her alarm clock jolts her awake, and she rushes off to her next class with a killer headache.

Things are different without her family. She's all alone, so she spends most of her nights alone, staring at night sky through a telescope that had used to be Peter's or knitting a sweater that she'd be gifting Lucy for the holidays or munching on one of Fry's Turkish Delights because Edmund would've liked it. Susan can't stand the taste and the chocolate only makes it somewhat bearable, so she does wonder how awfully good the raw form Edmund had been offered by the White Witch had been.

Not that she'd ever find out now.

Sometimes, she cries.

Well, most often times, she cries, alone, because that's just how it is. She cries because it's catharsis, because she'd implode if she didn't, and she cries because it all hurts, and when she's all done and bone-dry, she opens her bedroom window and sits by the ledge, feeling the fleeting night air like the faint skittering of whiskers against her skin. Her heart is too hardened by grief and life for her to hear the low rumble in the night, drowned out by the bustling city around her, but it is there, waiting for her.

She sees the world change once she moves to America to pursue a career in education, swept up by the rising voices of a new world, one that is vying for all of its diverse voices to be heard. She partakes in the wave of civil rights, not because it's the popular thing to do, but because it is the gentle thing to do, to stand up for another human being who's being trodden on. Gentleness can have a spine, and she has always had one since the moment she was crowned queen of another world.

In Narnia, thousands of years could have passed while she was gone, and in the mortal world, decades pass before her eyes. The grief of her life passes because all things do pass and while she'd known it would all be okay, the truth of reality is always harder to accept in the moment, but she'd known, in the end, in the back of her mind. She is a daughter of Eve with bigger plans spelled out for her, bigger than the stars and bigger than just the specks of the universe she can see from her bedroom window. It just took time, time in the mortal world, time for her to live and see and survive.

Time for her to come back.

**Author's Note:**

> title from Relent - Citizens & Saints


End file.
